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FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE Release Notes

Release Highlights

The highlights in the 8.2-RELEASE are the following:

[amd64] FreeBSD/amd64 now always sets the KVA space as
equal to or larger than physical memory size. This change would help to
prevent a “kmem_map too small” panic which often occurs
when using ZFS.[r214620]

The FreeBSD GENERIC kernel is now
compiled with KDB and KDB_TRACE options. From 8.2-RELEASE
the kernel supports displaying a stack trace on panic by
using stack(9) facility
with no debugger backend like ddb(8). Note that
this does not change the default behaviors of the GENERIC kernel on panic.[r214326]

The FreeBSD crypto(4) framework
(opencrypto) now supports XTS-AES (XEX-TCB-CTS, or XEX-based
Tweaked Code Book mode with CipherText Stealing), which is
defined in IEEE Std. 1619-2007.[r214254]

[amd64] Xen HVM support in FreeBSD/amd64 kernel has been improved. For more details,
see xen(4) manual
page.[r215788]

A new netgraph(4) node
ng_patch(4) has
been added. This performs data modification of packets passing through. Modifications are
restricted to a subset of C language operations on unsigned integers of 8, 16, 32 or
64-bit size.[r209843]

The FreeBSD TCP reassembly implementation has been improved. A long-standing
accounting bug affecting SMP systems has been fixed and the net.inet.tcp.reass.maxqlensysctl(8)
variable has been retired in favor of a per-connection dynamic limit based on the receive
socket buffer size. FreeBSD receivers now handle packet loss (particularly losses caused
by queue overflows) significantly better than before which improves connection
throughput.[r214865, r214866]

The siftr(4),
Statistical Information For TCP Research (SIFTR) kernel module has been added. This is a
facility that logs a range of statistics on active TCP connections to a log file. It
provides the ability to make highly granular measurements of TCP connection state, aimed
at system administrators, developers and researchers.[r214859]

The ZFS on-disk format has been updated to version 15 and
various performance improvements for the ZFS have been imported
from OpenSolaris.

Userland support for the dtrace(1)
subsystem has been added. This allows inspection of userland software itself and its
correlation with the kernel, thus allowing a much better picture of what exactly is going
on behind the scenes. The dtruss(1)
utility has been added and libproc has been updated to support
the facility.[r214983]

The gpart(8) utility
now supports a recover subcommand for GPT partition tables.

The gpart(8) utility
now supports GPT_ENT_ATTR_BOOTME, GPT_ENT_ATTR_BOOTONCE, and GPT_ENT_ATTR_BOOTFAILED attributes in GPT. The attribute keywords in
the command line are bootme, bootonce,
and bootfailed respectively.[r213994]

The libarchive library and tar(1) utility now
support LZMA (Lempel-Ziv-Markov chain-Algorithm) compression
format.[r213667]

The newsyslog(8)
utility now supports a special log file name <include> for
processing file inclusion. Globbing in the file name and circular dependency detection
are supported. For more details, see the newsyslog.conf(5) manual page.[r215622]

The pmcstat(8) utility
now supports a file and a network socket as a top source.
This allows top monitoring over TCP on a system with no
local symbols, for example.[r211098]

The tftp(1) and tftpd(8)
utilities have been improved for better interoperability and they now support RFC 1350,
2347, 2348, 2349, and 3617.[r213036, r213038]

A periodic script for zfs scrub has been added. For more
details, see the periodic.conf(5)
manual page.

A periodic script which can be used to find installed
ports' files with mismatched checksum has been added. For more
details, see the periodic.conf(5)
manual page.

The sysinstall(8)
utility now uses the following numbers for default and minimum partition sizes: 1GB for
/, 4GB for /var, and 1GB for /tmp.[r211007]